An expert in elections and polls believes the island could be a trailblazer when it comes to electronic voting.

Some have suggested moving to an online system could boost voter turnout, although there have been concerns over hacking.

Professor  Sir John Curtice from the University of Strathclyde has accurately predicted the outcome of four Westminster elections.

He feels whilst the size of the island could be used to trial such a move, a number of other factors need to be considered.

’Ideally what you would do if you were going to really prove whether [electronic voting] makes a difference to turnout or not is that you would do the election electronically in one half of the island and not in the other half and then see what difference it makes; but that may be quite difficult to swallow,’ Professor Curtice said.

However, he admitted a rise in turnout would not necessarily be as a result of a move to online voting.

Amendments to election law have been promised in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Critics claim such a move would be fraught with technical issues as well as becoming the target of hackers.

There are currently no plans to move to an electronic voting system.

Professor Curtice acknowledged that two crucial barriers were whether the electronic voting system would still have a paper trail, and if there is external access to the coding which implements voting.

He also said that he feels it would be a tough task for him to call the results of a Manx election in the way he had done for Westminster.

’The only way you can [call] any election is to do it by pollsters.

’But of course it’s very difficult to do in an election where it’s all independents, and you can’t just simply ask people which party they’re going to vote for. ’I wouldn’t fancy trying to predict an Isle of Man election at all to be honest.’